Aston Magna presents The Italian Madrigal and Its Legacy

For its season finale this weekend, Aston Magna takes a musical journey from the Renaissance into the late 20th century. That’s not unusual for normal concert fare, but as an early music series Aston Magna usually cruises around the Renaissance and Baroque eras and puts on the brakes at about the year 1750.

“Many of us play a good deal of 20th and 21st century music during the year. Summers are the time to recharge with earlier music, to go back to the source,” explains artistic director Daniel Stepner.

“The Italian Madrigal and Its Legacy” is the name of the vocal music program being presented on Friday at Olin Auditorium at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson and on Saturday evening at the Daniel Arts Center in Great Barrington, Mass.

“There’s such a rich store of madrigals from the 17th century, mostly secular works, involving the idea of unrequited love, sometimes humorous, sometimes bitter,” says Stepner, who adds that the great master of the form was Claudio Monteverdi. A generous sampling of Monteverdi’s madrigals, with and without instrumental accompaniment, will be on the program along with works of his contemporaries Carlo Gesualdo and Luigi Rossi.

It’s the “legacy” part of the concert, which comes after intermission, where Stepner and his small company of singers will go farther a field and also have some fun. There will be a capella works of Brahms, Debussy and Ravel, plus humorous works of Glenn Gould and P.D.Q. Bach.

The late Canadian pianist Glenn Gould was a famous eccentric and also a sometime composer. The concert features his famous but seldom performed composition for voices and string quartet, “So You Want To Write A Fugue?” Originally written for an educational television program on the musical form of the fugue, it features a text that explains the music as it happens.

“It’s a thorough going contrapuntal exercise to a humorous text,” says Stepner, who has made his own arrangement with violin, gamba and therbo. “He adds the instruments halfway through and throws in quotes of Wagner’s ‘Meistersinger’ and the Brandenberg Concertos.”

There’s even less sense of reverence in the selection by P.D.Q. Bach, the comic alter ego of Woodstock composer Peter Schickele. Spoofing Thomas Morley’s “My bonny lass she smileth,” Schickele wrote a parody titled “My bonnie lass, she smelleth.”

“The music is quiet serious and wonderfully written in madrigal style,” explains Stepner. “But it’s also very funny with double takes and pratt falls.”

Stepner could hardly let the entire season end with such a stench, and so the concert’s final piece will be a favorite of choral singers, the benediction by Christian Peter Lutkin (1858-1931), who championed a capella music in American at the turn of the 20th century.

Joseph Dalton is the author of “Artists & Activists: Making Culture in New York’s Capital Region” and a regular contributor to the Times Union. He blogs at: http://www.hudsonsounds.org.